Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what the ratio is of day to night flying of the T6 Texan II based at RAF Valley.

The set requirement of night flying on the Texan Ab-Initio Course to gain night flying qualification roughly equates to 95 per cent day flying and five per cent night flying. However, there has never been a military requirement in setting any form of ratio of land to sea training. The primary responsibility is to operate efficiently and safely within available airspace to deliver military training course aims.

For the Texan fleet, the Valley Aerial Tactics Area (VATA) and the RAF Valley/Mona Air Traffic Zones remain the most appropriate airspace to deliver many of these training aims. RAF Valley undertakes to distribute training activity as fairly as possible for all aircraft types based at the station, but the local airspace is surrounded by civil airways over much of the Irish Sea. Although a far greater proportion of Texan training is conducted over-water than a year ago, for all communities under the VATA airspace, a level of flying locally remains inevitable.